Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 283: Jealousy and burnout

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Jealousy - as bad as it is, it still happens. I was the first employed programmer at a startup. Within the first year of my work there an colleague from my previous company I worked for asked me if it’s okay with me if he comes work for the same start-up as me. Since I strive to be a good person and friend I answered “yes”, but deep down I knew it is a bad idea and what I was thinking will happen, happened. So few years passed in the same company and my friend got promoted higher than me and into a position I wanted to move to eventually. The company is kind of small and there is no room for more positions like his (Tech Lead). So now I live with Jealousy. Each time I see his title I’m reminded of it and I don’t know what to do. I’m even thinking about just leaving the company and never work with friends again. I have been doing software development for around 7 years now and in recent times I have lost the enthusiasm to write code at work. I mostly feel bored and tired. I have no other marketable skill and talking to people usually exhaust me, so moving into a management path is not an option. Honestly, I feel like, these days I am at work just for the money; I love the money, no complaints about it, and I want to make more of it. How can I still be relevant and valuable even if I am completely bored and waking up to work feels like a work in itself, these days? P.S: I have already tried quitting my job and that didn’t help. Now I am at my new job. Six months in and I feel bored already.

it takes more than aliasing your shell script aliases to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 283 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff that is required but that won't help you with aliasing your shell scripts which i just found out works in zsh while doing show prep i just i just wanted to type some code again it's been too long and well let me well let me let me describe the code i typed to test this okay made an alias echo with two e's and that was alias to echoing the string beans and then i made another alias that was echo but there's an underscore between the e and the rest of the word and that

it was alias to echo with two e's so that's like the level of technical depth that my brain is operating at now okay well that that's impressive i guess ask me all your architecture questions that's what i'm trying to say while you were talking i just aliased six deep in bash so can't confirm okay there's got to be a limit somewhere right undoubtedly because can you imagine like traversing millions of oh actually no maybe at alias creation time the shell the shell figures out the destination and just saves that and skips all the middle steps we need someone who remembers when unix cost money from at&t to tell us how this works exactly probably k or r one of those two well i think we can only get one of them oh did one pass away

i'm pretty sure what's his name richie yeah rich kernegy and richie a and r c yeah i think the r guy passed away i think richie passed away dennis richie didn't he well i'll tell you i've seen some just amazing youtube videos recently from k i don't want to say the last name again because i think i said it wrong about like the origin of grep and the origin of just a bunch of very interesting stories and i really enjoyed it i said kernig it's kernigan is that right i don't know he's between 78 and 79 years old so if you get it wrong and he tries to fight you you would win so it doesn't matter you're giving me a lot of credit this guy worked on unix that's true and i think he used emacs which means he has very strong hands

we we assume he'll be fighting with mere physical tools right okay would you like to thank our patrons jameson i would love to thank you so much to andrew pollock the yeet your job podcast every stirred soul ian walker aaron duna kashokton ohio cameron hall ira chan monkey fates emoji jonathan king testing is documenting dot org fizzbuzz influencer oladapo fadye karen sveinsen will angel ragnar harrison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden canes john grant i bought winrar nick cantar and philip john basile thank you so much you you help keep the show going and that helps keep me going it does in turn if you stop supporting the show jameson will also just stop it's scary

yeah so we better keep doing this show so people keep supporting us do you want to keep keep on by asking the first question yes i do okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says jealousy as bad as it is it still happens i started working at a startup i was first i was the first employed programmer here within the first year of my work there a colleague from my previous company asked me if it's okay with me if they come work for the same startup as me. Since I strive to be a good person and friend, I answered yes. But deep down, I knew it was a bad idea and what I was thinking would happen, happened. So a few years passed in the same company and my friend got promoted higher than me into a position that I wanted. The company is

kind of small and there is no room for more positions like this tech lead so now i live with jealousy each time i see their title i'm reminded of it and i don't know what to do i'm even thinking about just leaving the company and never work with friends again oh huh i appreciate that jealousy is capitalized in this question like it's a proper noun it makes it feel like a like a mythical concept or i don't know they asked me if it's okay if they come work at the same startup that seems weird i'm trying to figure out why that seems weird to me weird to ask permission yeah why wouldn't you just say i'm coming to work with you yeah good news you know why good news i'm your boss yeah so so they join at the same or similar

ish levels it sounds like there wasn't a hierarchy and now there is i could see that being weird although i i work with a person right now whose previous manager was their best friend and they said it was awesome so maybe it depends on the relationship i i could see it making it hard to be friends still if i mean i don't know how do you have a a tricky feedback conversation with somebody about their their work performance and then go i don't know whittle together or something afterwards i strive to be a good person so i answered yes yeah this is just weird to me it feels like it feels like the question asker suspected something but let it happen anyways instead of like yeah a friend came to work with me and now they're my boss and i'm jealous because

i wanted that job that feels like more straightforward but the the thing about the way it started feels like maybe they they were worried this was gonna happen i don't know have they maybe it's one of those friendships where uh you're kind of frenemies ah or like if you were in grade school this person would come and give you noogies all the time and say what's up buddy in a very condescending way you're like hey hey i love those noogies yeah yeah buddy buddy is a good name for a peer on equal standing i appreciate it yeah maybe it's a situation where the question asker thought uh-oh this person is way smarter and way better than me i don't want i don't want that kind of competition hanging around

and then sure enough boom what's that steve jobs quote about hiring didn't he say something about how uh a players high other hire other a players and b players hire c players kind of ruthless steve jobs thing to say it does it does you've proved him wrong if this is true because maybe you're a good player and you hired an a player so take that that's kind of mean but you know dunking on steve jobs all it takes is one counterexample yes yeah and the curse is broken and he will not rise again to right smash all your android devices by the light of the full moon as as would have happened so yeah i feel like i'm gonna ignore the the like what happened before

situation and maybe just deal with because i that i feel like there's more there that i cannot um just come up with on the spot yeah so how do you deal with jealousy uh-huh where maybe it's at the same company well has this ever happened to you first of all have you ever started as a peer with someone and then they've they've kind of risen above you in position somehow no jameson how dare you ask that question obviously obviously i'm the one that rises i that was exactly what was going through my head when i was asking that no dave you've probably done this to a lot of people on a ladder of skulls a career ladder composed entirely of the rib cages of my enemies

thanks for extending the hand of friendship i'll step my boot on it to boost myself higher up uh i know i can't say i have direct experience with this and well one of the very fortunate aspects of my professional career is that i've always been part of companies that are growing which means that there's never a a scarce position you know for leadership roles abound and usually usually in the companies i've been at there are actually more leadership needs than there are people willing to fill those needs and so like i remember maybe five six seven oh boy eight years ago i oh boy i there was a major management gap at my company in the engineering department and and we had tried a few different people that hadn't worked out from outside and i

knew i just knew like the person that's going to be successful in this role is someone who's been here for a while who has a lot of technical experience with our systems and company and so i went into my boss and i said look i will take a hit and be the manager for this team yeah and it was like so it was the totally opposite situation of what's being described here it's like no one else wanted that job and i knew it so i took the bullet it is that is very different in a culture of abundance that you described i have worked in both kinds of cultures where there are there are there's more responsibility that needs an owner than than people and i've worked in places where there's a a ladder and it's a tree and so the number of nodes at each level decreases

logarithmically and so there's a lot of people fighting no matter what level you're at there's a bunch of people ahead of you or at your same level and not to nitpick but the number of nodes decreases exponentially ah crud you're right logarithmically would be bad logarithmically would be great there'd be a lot of positions if you want them like it i guess it depends on whether you want to move into leadership yeah good news we have 7 000 ceos and only 8 000 total people in the company yeah what was my point though before i the abundance i was hopefully corrected oh yeah the abundance thing yeah hopefully correct it was a really nice way of describing what i just did it was helpful um yeah so if you're at a startup and the startup is successful

I think the point you're sort of making is just wait and more leadership opportunities will show up kind of right well I'm saying that this person appears to be not as lucky as I have been where leadership opportunities are bound yeah I guess not every startup becomes the the VC rocket ship startup right right right exactly each time I see their title I'm reminded of it and don't know what to do i mean this is a this is like one of life's biggest questions right how do i cope with knowing that other people have more than me or have what i want and i don't have it i i have professional advice and and deep personal failing around this so my professional advice is if there's a thing you want you should talk about it and try to achieve it if you want to become a technical

lead talk to your friend about how they did it say hey i want to i want to learn from this i want to get into this role. Well, that's smart. The more people know that you would like to be a tech lead and can give you feedback of you're doing it, you're not doing it. Here's what you should do if you want to angle for that role. I think the more likely you will be to get it. Yeah. And that's a good point. I wouldn't give up hope. And I do want to get to your deep personal failings, but can we, can I comment on that real quick on the professional? Oh, please. It's, it is very challenging and very unusual for people to jump to a new company from a non-lead role into a lead role and so you are more likely to achieve technical lead if that's what you're interested

in by staying at your current company or by quitting another company and then kind of restarting the process you know so so that is you are in a bit of a precarious situation yeah um so deep personal failing uh yeah this is rough for me i i have a really hard time being envious of people and especially people in my peer group i guess i don't know most people do probably to some extent but but uh i have to like not think about it or i get all stressed out that's your solution solution well don't think about i mean there are a few solutions no friends is one solution right because then nobody to be jealous of can't be jealous of these strangers i don't know that's my solution i don't have any others i said one solution because

there's only one solution okay no i don't know i don't know what the solution is besides not care about it as much but that's easy to say and hard to do yeah yeah especially if it's at work I I don't think I've had work jealousy I've had a few instances of I don't know that that person deserves it and maybe there's a part of it that thinks like and maybe I do but I think the bigger part of that feeling has been they actually they don't deserve it it's like an injustice that you Yeah, I have some former co-workers who I look at their titles on LinkedIn now, I'm like, just shake my head. Not that I want the title that they have now, but just what on earth happened there? And that's a really good point. Where do you go with that? I don't know. Chalk it up to me being wrong a lot.

Wait, what? No, just maybe my judgment was wrong, you know, or maybe they have grown since last time I interacted with them, or they're in a different role now that plays better to their strengths than when we worked together or something. Or maybe they went to the top of some mountain and got enlightened and came back down. Now they're a tech lead. Yeah. Or maybe they have compromising information on key individuals in the company. here's another idea that might help calm your spirit a little bit which is that being a tech lead actually kind of sucks

oh i love that you laugh are you laughing because it's true no it's so true yeah i'm like yeah you probably have a perfect you probably have a great job writing code without the burden of worrying about everyone else's code and worrying that you haven't. I mean, being in leadership and engineering is hard. It's a very different job. And I think, I don't know why this is, but in many other careers, other professions, there is this very strong desire to move up into management, as if doing the job that you do every day is so crappy that you just want to be in charge of the people who have to do that job every day, so you don't have to do that job anymore. most of the developers that i know they love their job and they're like i don't want to be in

management because then i wouldn't get to do this as much and i have to worry about all this stuff that frankly i don't want to worry about like oh i gave instructions but they got misinterpreted now i got to go clear that up or so and so is disgruntled at work and now i got to go like i got to go work on this problem of helping them become gruntled at work yes and it's like some people love that i love that i love working on that but a lot of developers don't so i mean that's maybe the cure here is uh what you want may not actually be that great that's such a good point about developers moving into management often having to give up something they really really like maybe it's not true about other maybe that's true about other roles as well but i yeah i i

don't know if it is or not i i think i share your perception of sometimes it's it's more fun to be in charge of the call center than to be a call center employee. Uh, yeah, that's a good example. That sounds better. I can go sit in my office and throw darts and watch, you know, watch music videos on MTV. Yeah. Throwback for you. You thought I was going to say Netflix. So that's kind of be mindful of the good times you're in right now. Yeah. Think of all the problems you don't have to deal with. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Just ask your friend, Hey, what's a really what's what's what's a big problem you have to deal with and then they tell you and you say huh and then you just walk away and go back to writing your code and if they say i don't have

a lot of problems you can become the problem oh yeah that's true look you are in a perfect position to punish this individual for taking your job by becoming a huge pain in the butt yeah so congratulations problem solved drive them out there you go might it might drive you out but you know yeah it's sort of like the plot of the parent trap except without the twins part you just have to i don't know put honey on their keyboard so their fingers get all sticky or something oh gosh it's a tough one imagine a professional feedback conversation with between a like a report and a manager where the manager is trying to give the feedback that please do not like tie a string across my chair wheels so

that it falls over when i try to scoot my chair back the situation was i was trying to roll backwards your behavior was you said a booby trap and the impact was now i have back pain The impact was my head against the wall. How would you react differently in that situation? Do a better job next time. Let's role play. I'm going to give you some string, and you're not going to put it on my chair. Oh, my gosh.

All right. Well, I got nothing else for this question. What do you have? I will just summarize by saying it's tough. You can't change the past. You made a decision a few years ago to let this friend in. make the best of it now if becoming a tech lead is really really important to you take steps from where you are today to get there but temper that with the fact that being a tech lead might not be

everything you think it is so definitely chat with some people who are in the job first like your friend yep all right jameson you want to read our next one i do this is from an anonymous listener who asks i have been doing software development for around seven years now and in recent times i've lost enthusiasm to write code at work i mostly feel bored and tired i have no other marketable skill and talking to people usually exhausts me so moving into a management path is not an option honestly i feel like these days i am at work just for the money i love the money no complaints about it and i want to make more of it how can i still be relevant and valuable even if i'm completely bored and waking up to work feels like work in and of itself these days

P.S. I have already tried quitting my job and that didn't help. Now I am at my new job. Six months in and I feel bored already. Oh, man. I can relate to the no other marketable skill thing. We talk about that a lot. If there's an apocalypse, Jameson and I are useless. Yeah, I do think about that a lot.

I have made steps to resolve that recently. I've started watching YouTube videos. there's this channel called Primitive Technology Ideas and it looks like they're in Southeast Asia somewhere like the Philippines or somewhere like that it's people that just got into the jungle and they take a rock and then they build

like a castle starting from a rock it's like real life Minecraft yeah that's a great way to I've seen those videos they're fascinating so I watch that and think yeah I could do all that yeah you're good fully trained passively absorbing that knowledge of what trees

are not going to poison me if I try and squeeze the leaves to get water out of them yeah i got it beautiful yeah so if if i need to do minecraft in real life in in like yeah in the philippines then you're ready i have a bit of preparation for it yes you're one step ahead of everyone else there okay there was this one video i was watching it with my daughter and i don't know how to describe it it felt so tense watching what he would do in real time we saw him find these chicken eggs and i thought oh awesome he's gonna roast him and he didn't and then he went back and set a trap to catch the chicken and i thought oh he's gonna kill the chicken and eat it and he didn't and he built a chicken cage and then like

had the chicken hatch the eggs and grew up a bunch of chickens and i thought he domesticated i would have died yeah i would i would have just tried to eat the eggs yeah and died a day later because i wouldn't have any food well you know what they say jameson give a man an egg feed him for a day teach a man to capture and domesticate chickens for life that is what this person demonstrated uh yeah so i i don't relate anymore okay you are now you are now fully trained for the apocalypse got it yes yep got it so you already tried quitting your job maybe you just need to quit your job a few more times have you ever turned something off and on again once and it didn't work and then you did it twice and it worked yeah like when you reverse the usb plug twice oh yeah

yeah yeah the third time it works that's true that's probably what's happening here universal principle my i saw my two-year-old son discover that principle in real time he just tried to plug it in it didn't work flipped it over tried again and then plugged it in again but he didn't know that that was weird he just thought oh this is the ritual i have to do right three times and then yeah that's fine no stranger than all these other things going on i don't understand yeah that's true i also don't understand where food comes from but whatever and those are at the same level of importance in my life plugging in the usb cable and food yeah exactly

uh what was i talking about oh yeah you were saying quit quit three times that's what you're saying okay yeah obviously a good idea This honestly feels like, I love the money, no complaints about it. Yeah, there is drying our eyes, you know, tiniest violin, wiping our tears with money, sad first world problems. That is one of the downsides of being in software engineering is if you switch careers, you'll probably take a giant pay cut. And often switching careers is something people do to find more meaning and value out of their career. but yeah it can make your life worse or at least be harder to contemplate if you're trying to say well how do i how do i get by with like 50 less income to do forestry or whatever the other thing i want to do is right so there's a bit of a bit of a golden handcuffs thing i feel that for sure especially as the question asker says i want more money yeah probably not quitting your career and starting over in a different field it's certainly not the short-term way to more money and and

unless it's like investment banking and you have several years of 100 hour work weeks in you then probably not ever going to result in more money long term yeah yeah so i i have felt this at acute points in my career a couple of different times where i felt for me the way it manifested was oh my gosh i've solved all these problems so many different ways so many times like oh you need a new restful api that lets you create new resources and then update them and delete them and list them oh i can do that in a few days i guess you know it's like oh man that was the one that really got me is like i'm doing this again um yeah and uh and it was time consuming and it just felt like It felt like I was carrying a lot of weight to just do these trivial programming tasks.

And by the way, I still couldn't estimate how long they would take. And it still took you a month, but it was boring that whole time. Right. And I think different people have different ways to cure burnout, but this is definitely burnout. I mean, this is like textbook burnout. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, this is classic burnout. I guess we should have said that sooner.

Yeah. But you are burned out, 100%. And this is a professional diagnosis from an actual space doctor on programming burnout. And I look back at those times, like the first time that hit me was around seven or eight years ago. And I'm like fully unburned out now. So there is light on the other side of the burnout tunnel. Just so that's a good thing to know is that there is hope. For me, the burnout cure is massive change in my profession.

one way that that manifested was moving across the country to take a new job that was in a totally new place and a completely new culture so like a hundred percent turnover in everything I thought I knew about software development all new tools all new languages new place to live and everything was just so new and exciting that worked for me that doesn't work for a lot of people but I love like total life reboot so that really works for me but you got to find something that works for you do you know anyone who has been burnt out and didn't they kind of got through it without big life changes like changing their job or their or their career or something like that you know i don't know i only i have a sample bias here because i think i only hear about the

people who make big life changes because they write blog posts about it you know yeah no one yeah that's a good point no one says i was really burnt out and then i waited and then i just kept i just kept doing my job and it's fine yeah no i'm fine um that probably happens all right yeah it probably does i think okay so i've definitely been burnt out and quitting my job has solved it but you said this didn't solve it for you i have also been burnt out and i'm trying to think what i i don't think i have a distilled list of steps that i did to fix it without quitting my job but i know it happened because i remember being burnt out and then unburnt out again at the same job yes at the same job oh i know what happened there was massive

change within at my same job that you didn't kind of cheating yeah i didn't initiate it i just got a different boss and different org and a bunch of different responsibilities and and that was exciting in the way that um like having to jump off a tall cliff into the water is exciting where you're you're not bored anymore you're hoping you can pull it off so that helped can you arrange for your VP to get fired. So you can be the VP? Well, no. Just kind of have it

trickle down. Some new VP comes in and then they have to change a bunch of stuff because otherwise what are they doing there? Right. What's the point of... Right. Okay. Yeah. How do they provide value if not by coming in and changing all the old systems into their new

preferred systems? This is like the ultimate job crafting, but it's like dice rolling and high stakes. and and yeah you might destroy the career of someone but you know at least you're not burned out anymore yeah that would be very engaging you could make a movie about that that's yeah high stakes are engaging i love the money and i want to make more of it so i want to make more of it i wonder if there's something there uh that is also linked to the quit your job again thing we're in these unprecedented times where it doesn't mean just covet it means also software

engineer hiring market is even more wild than i've seen it ever uh so you probably can make more money even if it's only been six months if you quit and do something else i know i know you just did that but it's possible that there is a challenging domain out there that will pay you more money that will get you less bored i i remember very distinctly this feeling of i do not care at all about javascript frameworks and whatever stupid new tool is gonna dramatically alter my workflow in a worse way now and just just dramatically make my work worse cynicism about about the state of uh front-end development and and my excitement to work on it and i feel like that just kind of went away over time without me deliberately addressing it

um i kind of stepped away from it for a bit and then i guess like from that technical domain in particular you mean yeah and then i've come back and i don't feel the same exhaustion i'm also a little bit less engaged than i was though i was i was very into keeping up with all of the things and now yeah now i let other people keep up with all the things and keep up with the people who distill the things right i don't think that's helpful advice for you though well i i think that's helpful i'll tell you i uh had a similar experience some time ago i transitioned my focus of caring away from the technology and toward what my business or team was trying to accomplish. And that really changed me. It was like, I care more about our customers. I care

more about the other teams we're serving. I care more about the objective, the mission that we're going for. And it was like, I took satisfaction in accomplishing that mission. And I've really focused on that over the last maybe four or five years and that that's been very helpful because then things that are repetitive don't feel meaningless and boring because they're all moving something larger along exactly i'm moving that's exactly the right way to put it i mean the classic cure everyone gives her burnout or the classic advice is always take vacation take a break of some kind yep i feel like i've seen about a 50 50 chance of that resulting in um people coming back less burnt out or coming back with the realization that i've got to get out of here

right but but again i mean that's a that could be a cure for burnout as well just if you're trying to stay working with that person it's not the cure you want i know someone who every six or seven years takes like a 12-week sabbatical usually like they save up a bunch of money and they're between jobs they quit their job they take a few months off and they just totally get off the technology grid they reconnect with friends and family and they focus totally on that and they always come back with a new perspective and and usually very substantial professional changes too like they might change the role that they want to go after they change the domain they're working in change the industry the one person i know has done this three times

well wait no two times three segments so fence post error you know three segments of fence and two fence posts got i i really envy that i think that's great uh i think you're taking a little time away from the day-to-day noise will really help to learn what's actually important in your life and for what it's worth i've never done this that sounds really useful and can i just ask your friend what they learned and then do that and then i don't have to right then you don't have to take the time off do all the hard part right i just hey can you give me your your like the formula yeah like your feats of that's the wrong word please deliver distill to me the insight and realizations you have had in a in a helpful executive summary right and i will act upon that

yeah i think there's some some developer specific burnout things or maybe work specific things i know sources as is traditional i feel like i've read this somewhere but i'll have to try and dig it up there's something about like control over your environment where if you and and impact of your work if you if you are doing work that doesn't matter and no seems to care that makes it harder to to avoid burnout if you have very low autonomy that also makes it harder if you're not shipping or delivering stuff then it can be easier to burn out and all those things can combine into the low autonomy never ship no impact yeah kind of a little swirling mess of of bad things so you can try and look at are there specific circumstances

Is it your current job that are making it worse? Or does this follow you in between jobs? Yeah. The Mayo Clinic has a book called Strategies to Reduce Burnout. I'm just Googling burnout stuff. It looks like a business course textbook or something. So probably read that and it'll tell you. Perfect.

Link in the show notes. We'll get a commission on every sale. Yes. Fractions of a penny. Yeah. Hey, if you don't want to be a Patreon subscriber, buy a thousand copies of this book. with our affiliate code instead. Maybe we're struggling.

I don't know. I'm going to conclude that we're struggling to answer this question because I think burnout is deeply personal and also there are not actually really good answers.

There's not like a pill or a course where boom, not burned out. Yeah. The worrying thing about that to me is I'm not burnt out right now.

I have been in the past. I might be again in the future. what do i do about it i if i feel like i haven't solved it it's it's probably ahead of me at some point yeah and it is i want to have the solution so i know here's here's the process i'll use to unburn myself out i will tune up the machine and it will keep operating well that will come in episode 350 when we get to that point in your next burnout phase okay i'm gonna add a note to our tracking board to look at episode 350 okay see how prophetic this is got i'm gonna add episode 350 already right oh gosh it's gonna screw up a lot of systems oh is it i don't know i'm just

teasing undoubtedly is jameson burned burnt out or burned out burninated out i think is the correct We're burn-inated out, like Dave said in episode 283. All right. Okay, we're good to go. And with that, question answered a year and a half from now. Yes. What could people do if they want their own questions answered? Maybe even in the upcoming episode 350, the burnout one.

Yeah. Go to softskills.audio and click the Ask a Question button. If you have a particular week you want the question to be answered, just put in a number for the episode there and thank you so much to everyone who submits questions we love all of them thank you you keep the show going and so we will keep going we'll catch you next week